It is critical that infants may be evacuated from facilities such as hospital nurseries and day-care nurseries in a swift and saft manner under emergency conditions. It is important that several infants be evacuated by one attendant rather than just one infant at a time. It is important that infants be transported in such a way that they cannot be dropped or injured. In emergencies such as fires, it is also important that infants be protected from smoke and flying embers during transport.
A multi-pocket apron for carrying children is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. Des. 275,812. The ornamental design depicts an apron to be worn by a person which covers only one side of a person, either front or back, and which contains six pockets on the front side of the apron. Three pockets are spaced across the width of the apron and the height of each pocket stretches from the middle of the apron to almost the top of the apron. The other three pockets are placed across the width of the apron and extend from the bottom of the apron to near the middle of the apron. The pockets appear to be ordinary pockets with no special features for placement of children within or for the protection of children from smoke or flying embers.
A rescue stretcher having a plurality of pockets spaced at intervals along the length thereof in which to place babies during evacuation is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,783,862. At least two attendants are required to transport the babies being evacuated by the stretcher and babies situated in the pouches of the stretcher are not entirely protected from exposure to smoke or flying embers in an evacuation through a fire.
A coat which includes a pocket for carrying an infant is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,079,467. The purpose of the coat is to provide an integral covering for both parent and child and to ready the child for the outdoors without requiring the parent to specially dress the child. The coat, however, would serve no particularly useful purpose in evacuating more than one baby at a time in an emergency situation.
The ornamental design for a twin baby carrier is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. Des. 307,821. A limitation of such a carrier for emergency situations is that only two infants at a time may be transported in the carrier. There appear to be no special features for protecting infants transported in the carrier from smoke or other dangers inherent to fires.